A trip in the Ambulance

It started out as any other night shift in the ER, only in my opinnion that the group of doctors (el-we7da) was the worst group of doctors managing the ER.  Anyway, as we sat there, a middle-aged woman (who later on turned out to be a nurse), came in with her father who was in cardiac arrest.  They statred straight away working on the old man and called for the cardiology resident to come down and take a look at the patient who had just come back from arrest.  By the time the cardio resident came down the man had gone into cardiac arrest for the second time.  Under the cardio resident's specialized hands and compitence, the old man's ticker started beating again.

Anyway, out of nowhere, they decided that the man should be transfered to Al-Hussein hospital.  Of course the man had to be transferred, through an Ambulance with 2 doctors in it.  Guess who one of the doctors was!!

Anyway, we were given our home made lunch box of epi, and atropine, and placed in one of the newer ambulances with a cardiac monitor, DC defib, a whole box of meds and 2 paramedics.

The paramedics, one was a business graduate and the other a media graduate with a 2 week crash course on how to be a paramedic and drive crazy.  I guess the only thing they took out of it was the crazy driving part.  Extremely useless people.

Anyway, the old man's heart was still ticking as we started moving.  Once we reached our hospital's gates, the monitor decided that it was not going to work any more.  Typical.  The battery was malfunctioning, although we were in one of the relatively new ambulances.

Ok, we had to go old school and use pulse and heart beat.  Just as we reached the Abbasia bridge and just as we started going up the ramp, the old man's heart stopped.  Not knowing whether this was an asystole or VF, I did what I had learned and considered this witnessed arrest a VF and started  giving pericordial thumps and meds.  I  then tried turning the monitor on, which actually worked but only gave us 5 secs of beats at a time then went off again.  Which was fine because it gave us enough time to see the VF waves, which I was very happy to see, because that meant we could still shock the man.  "Charge the defib pls" I yelled at the paramedic.  "It doesn't work sir, and it never has" was the paramedic's answer.  Fine, old school again, continue with the pericordial thumps and meds.

Now when you just think nothing else could go wrong and just as we were approaching the other side of the bridge going down, the lights insde the ambulance turned off and I could hear the sounds of the engine and car mechanics rumble slowly and fad away into a silence.

Helllllll no, that can't be happening.  But it did.  The whole donkey cart broke down actually blocking half of the road in one of the busy streets of Cairo at 11 pm.

Now, there are no lights at this moment inside the ambulance, and so they decide to open the ambulance doors for light until another ambulance comes for rescue.  So were now doing CPR practically in the middle of the street with everybody watching, and our light source was the headlights of the traffic behind us.

After about 35 mins the other ambulance finally decided to show up, equipped with absolutly nothing, except for a stretcher, the moment we stepped into the other ambulance, and I guess from frustration, the old man stopped gasping.

Now, while all of that was going on, the daughter was yelling at us, telling us that we should stop recussitating her father.  Imagining myself in one of the ER episodes I yelled back "I'm not stopping as long as your father is gasping, I'm not going to kill him" ta ta ta taaaaa.  One can only imagine.

That was not the end of it.  After me and my collegue got back to the hospital, we found the same paramedics coming in asking us to write a report to file at the police station, because the old man's family stole him from the ambulance and ran away with him before giving them a chance to go to a hospital and write a death certificate.  I had no idea what in the world that was about, but I was happy to write them the report and send them off to kill more people.

Rabena yostorha ma3ana